


Upon the Midnight

by kali_asleep



Series: Upon The Midnight [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, Dreams, FYJLFF, Implied Relationship, M/M, Nightmares, Supernatural - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-28
Updated: 2012-10-28
Packaged: 2017-11-17 06:48:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/548763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kali_asleep/pseuds/kali_asleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His head cracked against the concrete. The ringing got louder, rushed into his ears like a tidal wave of electrostatic discharge. He was vaguely aware of blood—vibrant, front-door red—pulsing out from his chest and bubbling into the cracks in the driveway. John’s eyes rolled back, and as they did he saw for a split-second the dark figure from before, now standing in the middle of the road. Despite how the white light pounded down, the figure remained as black as ever.</p><p>In the moment before he died, John swore he heard it whisper.</p><p>-Boring.-</p>
            </blockquote>





	Upon the Midnight

**Author's Note:**

> SUPER-DE-DOOPER-DE-UPDATE: 
> 
> After many months and tons of fantastic comments, I have finally put enough together to continue the story set out in this fic. I'll be keeping this original story unchanged, as it was originally for the contest; the new story, Hypnagogia, will borrow heavily from Upon the Midnight in the first chapters and then move on from there. A thousand thanks to everyone who encouraged me to keep writing in this crazy dream universe: I hope you enjoy!
> 
> ~
> 
> UPDATE:
> 
> Oh my gosh guys I won ahhh! Many, many thanks to Devin, Shoy, and Alex over at fyjlff's tumblr - being able to write for and enter their October contest was an absolute honor. An endless number of thanks to Devin for the beautiful cover I'm trying to figure out how to update, and even more thanks to all of the wonderful readers who have left their comments and kudos over the past week.
> 
> ~~
> 
> A thousand thanks to my best friend and fantastic beta Quinn_Anderson, without whom I would have never finished this. The constant encouragement and efficient brit-picking made this work better than it was before. An entry for fuckyeahjohnlockfanfic.tumblr.com's Supernatural fic contest! (Will be added to and edited after the contest is over)
> 
> Double PS - sorry for the formatting, HTML driving me insane.
> 
> ~

[](http://imgur.com/gqmKx)

The streetlights cast a harsh, almost clinical white light on the dirt road down which John stumped. Despite the blackness of the sky overhead the ramshackle houses with their knotty lawns were set in garish relief as John peered at them; shadows cast by fences and mailboxes stretched out towards the homes and carved leering faces across their worn vinyl fronts. John stopped as he came to the front of one. The cracks in the empty driveway mapped an erratic path between him and the front door. He began to follow them, stepping carefully along them. Under the glare of the too-bright streetlights the door was blood red. He paused. Blood red.

But no, no, the door had been russet when he was a child—the colour of his mother’s hair, dyed to scare away the grey. 

Abruptly John turned on his heel, staring out into the street. It was devoid of any cars, people, or animals, but there was no mistaking that it was the road he had grown up on. But no, wait, just moments before, John had been walking the streets of London, had turned down an alley he knew as a shortcut to Bart’s—he’d been rushing to get to an exam—  
but he was already a doctor, he was done with his exams—

Mystified, John whirled around to again face his old home. His mother had thrown the door wide open and was screaming at him, a single finger pointing to his chest. He couldn’t hear her though, couldn’t tell what she was saying, could only see the horror that surfaced in her widening eyes as she continued to shout. The silence was suddenly overwhelming: it drowned out the bang of his heart and the pull of his breath and transformed into a low ring that uncurled in his ears and steadily grew louder. He was disoriented. John turned to the street again. A figure stood beyond the shocks of light cast from the lamps. John could see no more than an outline: tall, impossibly slim, completely dark. He glanced back at his mother. She had been blanched by the light, and had lowered her ghostlike hand. Opening his mouth to speak, John took a step towards her. Her lips—a faint line of pale pink—pressed firmly together and her eyes narrowed. John took another step. She raised her hand again and curled her fingers into the facsimile of a gun. Pulled the trigger.

His head cracked against the concrete. The ringing got louder, rushed into his ears like a tidal wave of electrostatic discharge. He was vaguely aware of blood—vibrant, front-door red—pulsing out from his chest and bubbling into the cracks in the driveway. John’s eyes rolled back, and as they did he saw for a split-second the dark figure from before, now standing in the middle of the road. Despite how the white light pounded down, the figure remained as black as ever.

In the moment before he died, John swore he heard it whisper.

_Boring._

~

Convulsing, John pulled his eyes open. For the measure of a few loud heartbeats he was paralyzed, unable to move under the incredible pressure on his bare chest. The skin around his scar seemed to twitch painfully, causing the dull ache near his shoulder to intensify into a single point of nauseating pain. Pumping desperately, his heart urged him to action.

John abruptly hauled himself out of his sweat-damp bed. Underneath his feet the linoleum floor of his little one-room flat was cool and slightly sticky. Familiar. Reaching for the cane he usually kept propped up by the nightstand, he cursed as he saw its dim outline on the other side of the room—he must have batted it away in his sleep. Limping slowly, John made his way to the toilet and switched on the light. The light from the uncovered bulb was harsh on his eyes—John thought of a familiar street, the colour of blood under fluorescents.

“Just a dream, Watson,” he muttered, staring at the sagging, sallow face in the mirror.

For the rest of the night John huddled at the edge of his bed, mind replaying the words to the pace of his pounding heart.

_Just-a-dream-just-a-dream-just-a-dream-just-a-dream…_

~

For a week, the dreams continued. One night Harry drowned face-down in a pool of her own vomit while John watched on, helpless, his fumbling hands never seeming quick or coordinated enough to reach out and turn her over. Another night the Humvee John was driving down a crowded street in Afghanistan spun out of control, skidding over thick oil that seemed to ooze out from the mouths of the local women. That same night he dreamt again, twice, maybe two hundred times, though all he remembered was staring up into his own sun-worn face while blood escaped around a hunk of shrapnel lodged in his gut. Past his sister, and the women, and his reflected look of terror though waited the figure: dark and gaunt against the white walls or red sand that rose up in his dreams. At first, John only saw the shape in the split second before everything in the dream went to hell; after spotting the harbinger of disaster, John would have just enough time to feel his stomach wrench and then the whole world would fall apart at his hands. 

The longer the dreams went on, though, the more he began to notice. A soldier on instinct, John began to scan the landscape of his nightmares as if they were enemy territory, and soon enough he saw the looming silhouette at every point in his dreams. No matter the lighting or time of day in the dream the figure was always umbra black, always close enough to observe but never close enough to truly see. It wavered endlessly on the peripheral.

Frankly, John was sick of it.

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

John was yelling. He wasn’t quite sure if he’d just slid into his first dream, or if perhaps he’d been dreaming already for hours on end, but the words nonetheless scraped past his dry throat and echoed across the darkened desert of the newest scene. With a terse grunt John pushed himself off his knees, letting the Afghani boy with the crushed ribs and the eerie, eyeless face roll out of his arms. On unsteady feet he spun around to where he knew the figure would be; as soon as John came even with its black form the boy behind him began to choke out plaintive cries. 

“No, no you don’t, you bastard.”

He didn’t turn around. Instead, John shrugged off the heavy med pack he’d somehow found himself carrying and made his way across the sand to where the figure stood. 

The dark shape wavered like a distorted picture on a bad VHS, then suddenly flickered away and reappeared further off from where it had stood before. John cursed under his breath but did not stop; sand kicked up behind him as he began to run. The figure flickered in and out again and again the closer John got. 

“Fuck you,” he huffed, slowing to a stop. “This is my head, I make the calls.” Running a hand through hair, John squinted in the direction of the shape. 

Sand lurched underneath him and suddenly John was taking a slow step forward. Without quite remembering how he had closed the distance between himself and the figure. It began to flicker once more.

“No,” he snapped, voice carrying the command of his days as a captain. The black body stayed firmly in place, and John slowly reached out to it. Even at less than four feet away, the features of the figure were still indistinct, dark and vaguely humanoid.

A strange sound slithered over his ears as his hand came within inches of the shape: the sound of rainwater sliding over cobblestone; the impossible sound of a cat slinking through a thick fog; a low, smooth sound that John belatedly registered as a voice.

_Trust issues… never fully comfortable unless struggling to regain control through brutish methods…_

“Hey, sod off!” 

The semi-speaking stopped and the black figure’s head snapped to the side. Before John could react, one of the figure’s arms darted toward him and _pushed._

~

“Oh hell.”

John met his own paling eyes in the scummy reflection of the mirror. He was tired, that much was certain, the little red capillaries crackling around his irises revealing his nights of restless sleep.  
It wasn’t his haggard face, though, that had drawn such a reaction from the doctor. No, instead, it was the welt rising along his collarbone, the sting of which he’d only noticed while scrubbing down in the shower. He brought one slightly shaking hand up to cover the bruise. Between the purpling swells and the reddish looking marks that criss-crossed his collarbone, it looked to John that he’d tried to both claw at his skin and restrain himself simultaneously.

Except for the fact that the mark itself, undeniably shaped like an open hand, was made by fingers longer and slimmer than his own. 

~

The dream took no time in escalating. John came into it running a dim stretch London street, surrounded by the men from his old company. Ahead he could see where his superior had stopped and shoved the barrel of his rifle into the mouth of a kneeling child. John stumbled to a halt and veered to his left, coming eye to almost eye with the faceless figure.

_Sense of morality predicates he turn on his men to stop the harming of innocents, but his unerring loyalty makes him hesitate…_

The figure was speaking again, though John saw no mouth to move. It seemed not to have noticed John’s sudden turn to it.

“No, what’s making me hesitate is that fact that I’ve definitely gone off the deep end and am being insulted by some bloody figment of my imagination in my own sodding dream! Is this just some game to you?”

_Oh-_

The streets of London fell away and were replaced by a thick fog. Though he had been only feet away the figure vanished. With a huff John reached out to where it had been. Nothing. John took a few shuffling steps, blindly moving through the mist. The white wall pressed in around him, its shifting shapes making him dizzy. 

_Obvious that another distraction is necessary. It seems as though the soldier’s survival instinct is too heavily influencing…_

Of course. John rolled his eyes and turned so that he was walking in the direction of the voice. The voice grew louder as he picked up his pace; it seemed as though the figure had become too distracted with his own plotting to continue running.

John took a resolute step forward and stepped into a clearing. It was as though he’d walked out of one room and into another; when he turned back though, all he saw was an endless expanse of white floor. The voice was muttering now, words indecipherable.

“Do you ever shut up?” John asked as he faced the figure.

Jutting cheekbones and a piercing stare filled the face of the man who glared back at him. Without knowing, John knew that this was his figure, the shadowy shape who had tormented his dreams for over a week. Had John not been so livid, he might have noticed the unearthly translucence of the man’s skin, or the way the air around his unruly dark curls writhed and shimmered like a heat wave. He did not notice the birdlike lightness of the man’s wrist as John snatched it in a tight grip and pulled away at his own shirt, nor did he notice the slight point of the other man’s teeth when his mouth opened to protest.

What John did notice, however, was that the stranger’s outstretched hand, forced onto John’s collarbone, matched perfectly the mark left there. With a noise of disgust John threw the man’s hand away from him.

“That _hurt_ , you arse,” John grit out. The stranger’s jaw dropped slightly, then closed with a perfunctory snap. 

“Perhaps if you hadn’t been so foolishly insistent on pursuing me, you would have avoided the injury.” The man’s voice was the same as he’d heard before, if not sharper. 

“And let you keep messing with my dreams? I might have been stupid enough to create you, but I’m not dumb enough to let you keep going.”

“Create _me_?” The man ran a hand through his hair and let out an ugly snort. “I think you’ve validated your idiocy, John.”

John spun around, raising his hands in exasperation. “That’s it, I’ve gone crazy!”

“No, I guarantee you that you’re only afflicted with stupidity. I’m just as real as you are.”

“Says the dream man in the dream world.” John felt ready to tear out his hair in frustration; the other man was already trying to, both hands now cording angrily through black curls.

“Dream man—incredibly original. If I were a figment of your sleeping mind, then how can you explain the existence of the mark?” The man sprung into motion, grabbing John by the wrist and spreading out his hand.

“You’ve got the hands of a soldier: even though you’ve been back in London for months, the callousing on the skin between your thumb and forefinger are evidence of prolonged holding of a gun. Your fingers are slightly shorter than average for an adult human male, but you made up for it in surgery with incredibly steadiness—until the shooting, of course.” The man extended his other hand and pressed it against John’s. His pale fingers rose over the top of John’s.

“There’s no way you could have made a bruise like that with your own hands,” he said. John pulled his hand out of the stranger’s grip and cursed under his breath.

“Who _are_ you then?”

“Sherlock,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Bless you,” John muttered. “Yea, there’s no way my mind would come up with a name that posh.” 

“It’s a family name!” Sherlock exclaimed, looking scandalised. 

“You’re real—and a wanker at that—but you’re not human?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Obviously.” 

“So…?”

Sherlock began to pace, the click of his expensive-looking dress shoes echoing through the surrounding nothingness. “Do I really have to spell everything out for you? I’m a dream eater.”

“Uh huh. And?” John folded his arms over his chest, hoping to hide his bewilderment with nonchalance. It riled Sherlock even more.

“A dream eater: living night terror, sleep-demon, night hag! I’m a psychic parasite who lives off of the energy of the sleeping human mind. You’ve likely heard of the most vulgar approximation of what my kind are: succubae-”

“You mean you give people nightmares and then shag them in their sleep—God, have you been shagging _me_ in my sleep?” John took a step back from the other man, feeling strangely tense.

“Of course not!” Sherlock snapped, stepping in very close to John, looming over him. “I’ve done extensive research and found that the fuel produced by sheer human terror is infinitely more… _satisfying_.” The feral grin that stretched across his face as Sherlock noticed John flinch made John uncomfortable: for the first time, John noticed the point of his teeth. “Though there are a few of our kind who continue to subsist off of sexual energy—The Woman is particularly infamous for her feasts.”

Annoyance flickered over Sherlock’s face as he paused in thought. John took a few steps back and began to turn slowly. 

“So we’re in my head, and you’re feeding off of me?” 

“I _was_ feeding off of you, but since you’re no longer frightened you’re no longer giving off energy. In fact it’s really become rather bothersome—trying to keep you occupied has taken up valuable amounts of brain power that could have otherwise been working on my most recent experiment.” 

“Oh, sorry to interrupt your meal! I’ll just go on back to letting you mess with my dreams and driving me half-insane.”

“If you would be so kind—”

“If you’d be so kind as to get out of my head!” John shouted, balling his hands into fists. 

The other man’s eyes narrowed, darkening as his entire face contorted. “Absolutely not.”

John’s jaw dropped, his face reddening with indignation. “Excuse me?” His clipped voice held all of the muted rage of a captain.

“I. Said. No.” Sherlock’s voice oozed with defiance. “I will not be leaving until the time is right.”

John opened his mouth to respond, but was suddenly drowned out by the wailing of an alarm. In front of him, Sherlock’s entire form began to flicker. The room splintered around him, black cracks cutting into the white. Sherlock’s features melted away; he was the figure once more. 

_Out of time_ , he rumbled. 

~

John woke up mid-gasp. The grating buzz of his alarm continued for minutes as he sat in bed, hands pressed over his eyes. 

~

“Alright there, John?”

The doctor looked up from the murk of his coffee cup. He sighed and smiled at the mousy woman standing above him.

“Fine, Molly, just tired. Haven’t been sleeping well. Sit?”

“Ta.” The pathologist sat down, setting her lunch tray at the table with a heavy clunk. “Is it the PTSD?” she asked, forehead wrinkling.

Molly, with her soft brown eyes, had a sharp perception and quiet, straightforward approach to people. Of everyone John had met or reunited with since his return from Afghanistan, she was the only who treated him as if he was made of something other than glass.

“Nah. Well, maybe. Nightmares, mostly—some from the war, some just completely…” John trailed off and stared back down into his coffee. The liquid swirled languidly, and John was reminded of a head of black, curled hair. “Bizarre,” he finished. “They’ve been going on all week, night after night.”

Molly nodded and picked at her food. “I’m sure they’ll quit soon. You know, those things seem to run in cycles.”

~

“You see, once you have access to the whole of the human mind, nearly anything is possible. Even the simplest person has an array of memories and experiences to build from. I have the unique ability to draw on these and deduce from them the deepest points of terror—most of the others like me simply follow pre-ordained patterns of fear: car crashes, losing teeth, things that go bump in the night. Rudimentary nonsense.”

In the bright glow of a neon “Open” sign, Sherlock’s sharp profile was electrifying. John sped up to match his long strides, happy that he didn’t have to worry about exhaustion or his limp in the dream-world. Sherlock had transformed the white space of his mind into a startlingly accurate reproduction of London (“I see everything through memories,” he’d explained as the Parliament Building rose up in front of them, “And without the dampening effects of emotion.”). The other man’s lips were drawn up in a tight smirk, an expression that John was beginning to recognise as pride. 

“Yea, yea, better than everyone else, big shock there,” John teased. 

“I happen to be the _best_ ,” Sherlock said with a sniff that could only be described as dainty. “I was able to so thoroughly terrorize a man that he was pushed to the brink of insanity; I, in fact, ensured his suicide.”

Sherlock had walked nearly 20 feet before he realized John had stopped. The doctor gaped at him, open-mouthed and angry. With a frustrated sigh Sherlock strolled back to him.

“Get it out,” he said.

John blinked rapidly a few times before shaking his head. “Sherlock, you can’t just do that! You can’t just make a person kill himself like that!”

“Well obviously I’m quite capable of doing so,” Sherlock said sharply, his chin hitching up as he stared down at John.

“Okay, fine, so you _can_ , but that doesn’t mean you _should_! Those are living, thinking, feeling people!” John’s gesticulated wildly, unable to keep up with his frantic mind. “Would you do something like that to me?” He bit the last words out without thinking; he suddenly remembered the first night, filled with shadows and blood, and wondered if perhaps Sherlock had been trying to do exactly that.

Sherlock had been unusually still as John spoke, but as John uttered those last words he began to fidget, tugging at the hem of his tailored jacket and running his fingers over opal cufflinks. 

“The man who died was a gangster responsible for eight counts of murder in Florida, not to mention an abusive husband. He was not a good man, John, and it was his very own memories of the people whose lives he’d savaged that brought on his demise.” Sherlock came closer as he spoke; it gave John the distinct impression of a pale-eyed jaguar cutting through the jungle’s underbrush. Elegant, deadly. John worried at his bottom lip with his teeth, leery. 

“But you.” The man looked down at John, and his eyes snagged over John’s teeth and lips. “I would never do something like that to you, John. You may be an imbecile sometimes but you’re…” Sherlock paused, still picking at his cufflinks in the rare silence. “You’re interesting. Distinct in a way that others simply are not.” 

The loud thumping of blood in John’s ears nearly made him miss Sherlock’s next words. Sherlock swung away from John, almost managing to hide the flush along his cheeks as he spoke.

“Did you know that I could sense the very moment you returned to London?” He’d started walking again; John rushed to match his pace once more. Shop fronts, lit but empty, slid out of view as they turned down a dim alleyway. At the end of the alley waited a vacant taxi. Sherlock pulled open the door and practically pushed John in. He nodded to the driver—a pitch black, humanoid figure—and continued as the taxi merged back onto the street.

“All of the anger, the remorse, the tumultuous guilt and hatred of an invalided army doctor with a bad shoulder and a psychosomatic limp. You should know by now that I _loathe_ human emotion. It’s only useful for feeding, otherwise it’s just _messy_ and _predictable_. But as soon as you came into the city I could sense you, sense all of that feeling pulsing out of you.”

Sherlock stared out the window and spoke quickly, but John could see the pained look of Sherlock’s reflection. “You were a blindingly bright lighthouse and I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t focus on anything until I explored all of that horror, untangled all of that terror in your funny little brain and gorged myself.”

John’s sharp exhalation caught the dream-eater’s attention. When he turned back, his strained look had been replaced with a queer mix of hatred and delight. 

“This nearly human shape of mine makes you forget that I’m a monster. I prey on your kind, have hunted down your dreamers for centuries.” The sharp laugh that burst past Sherlock’s pointed teeth make John shiver. Sherlock’s grin grew wider. 

“You see? Generations of fear of my kind, locked in the subconscious of your human ancestors. We used to be wilder, in the days when demon and fey openly walked the earth. My kind would coax humans into fits of passion and fear, whisper into their ears the words used to start wars, make them so fitfully paranoid and then watch as they tore themselves apart.” 

Without warning Sherlock lunged at John, long fingers wrapping around the collar of his jumper. The frenzied flicking of Sherlock’s eyes was met by John’s even gaze. The doctor did not pull away. 

“Sherlock,” John sighed, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “If you don’t stop spewing such ridiculous nonsense I will punch you right in the face. This is still my dream, in my head—don’t think I won’t.”

The cab shuddered to a halt, and Sherlock loosed John’s collar from his grip. One swift eye roll and a head shake later, John was standing on the steps outside a group of flats. Sherlock followed behind, tugging at his jacket. The doorknob turned under John’s touch without a key, and the two of them walked up the stairs to the little flat Sherlock liked to call his “mind palace”.

When John had returned the night after their first introduction, Sherlock dramatically agreed to show him his methods. They’d come first to the flat on Baker Street (“Having a point of familiarity helps me maintain my focus even as I switch hosts. I’m able to store away my thoughts and research and access it no matter who I’m in.”), where Sherlock had explained the principles of body-hooping using a corkscrew and two mushy-looking oranges. The flat had been a constant now for the two weeks that John had been privy to Sherlock’s mad world. 

John toed off his shoes as Sherlock shrugged off his jacket. Meandering over to the kettle, John let his gaze rake over the stacks of books and diagrams that cluttered the kitchen table. Much of the bric-a-brac was penned in a decidedly non-human language composed of erratic swirls; he could only wonder how ancient the text—and Sherlock, for that matter—truly were. Water sloshed in the kettle as he filled it. The realness of the sound, the motion, caught John off guard. He’d nearly forgotten he was still dreaming. From the living room came the sound of Sherlock collapsing onto the couch with a huff.

“I know you’ve been dying to tell me ever since you brought it up. Exactly how did you manage to catch a serial killer by giving a DI at Scotland Yard nightmares for a month?” He switched the kettle on, water beginning to heat as Sherlock bubbled into his tale.

~

“No more nightmares, then?” Molly smiled at him over the rim of her habitual morning coffee.

“Not at all. Seems all I needed to do was negotiate with my mind.” He knew it was foolish, but the grin that stretched across his face was so wide it made his cheeks ache.

~

“Are you real, then?” John mused, looking over a book Sherlock had given him earlier. While written in Middle English, the text on supernatural beasts was complex enough that it may as well have been entirely alien.

The last hour had seen Sherlock standing at the window of the flat, staring silently over his fabricated London. Every once and a while John would glance up from his book to see whole swathes of city lights go out, or a building rumble up from a previously empty street. 

“Don’t be boring, John,” was the only response he got. His lean frame turned towards John as every light bulb on Baker Street burst simultaneously. The explosion of light set Sherlock’s entire body in relief for one achingly brief moment. The stunning cut of his back, the aquiline rise of his cheekbones—he was irrevocably beautiful. 

“Do you get off on that?” John snorted. He raised an eyebrow and swallowed down the sudden rush of heat to his head. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sherlock said with a smirk. 

“Please, the light shows and sweeping panoramic views of London? Tearing down an entire building in seconds simply because it was in your way last night? Making the London Eye a triangle because circles are ‘boring’?” John turned a page in his book, pretending to focus on the reading while watching Sherlock out of the corner of his eye. He’d kept his voice just neutral enough for Sherlock to pick up on the joke. “Who are you trying to impress, Sherlock?”

Sherlock stalked over to where John sat on the couch and slumped down next to him. 

“I’m _bored_ , John.” The man slid down in his seat and then flopped over, limbs limp, head in John’s lap. “Bored and hungry. I’m not creating any nightmares, you’re not exuding any terror whatsoever, and it’s incredibly dull!”

Sherlock’s lips puckered out petulantly; John didn’t resist the impulse to pull his fingers though the other man’s hair.

“Poor, pitiful you. Are you saying I’m boring?”

As he opened his mouth the respond the entire flat was suddenly filled with an eerie red light. Sherlock shot up immediately and went over to the window. The sky outside shuddered back into blackness, then lit up red three more times.

“Sherlock…?” John stood up and peered outside. 

“Mycroft,” Sherlock muttered. He’d gone a shade paler. Spinning on his heel, he leveled John with a piercing gaze. “I’ve got to go.”

“What?” 

“It’s time for me to leave. He’s found me, and I haven’t figured out how to stop him yet. If I stay, he’ll track you down and…”

The walls of the flat began to peel away, showing the white expanse underneath. The sound of shattering glass sent John into motion—leaping forward, he tugged sharply at Sherlock’s wrist.

~

_Open your eyes. You’re awake now so open your damn eyes!_

John struggled against the paralysis of his sleep. A deep weight had settled over his chest and seemed to permeate the rest of his body, making it impossible to move. His eyes yanked open. 

His own hand stretched out above him, wrapped around the wrist of a startled Sherlock. The man was perched on John’s chest, toes of his bare feet curled into John’s tee-shirt. Even in the dark of his bedroom John could see that Sherlock’s features were rougher, less ethereal in the real world. Vain bastard, he tried to spit out, but he remained frozen.

“I’ve got to go, John. There’s a tick who will bleed us dry if he finds me.”

_Are you coming back?_

Sherlock grimaced as if he’d heard the question. “Goodbye.”

John woke up, more exhausted than he’d been in weeks.


End file.
